


It's Okay, I Wouldn't Remember Me Either

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Stripper/Exotic Dancer, Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, Snapshots, Stripper!Lucien, Suicide, Vampires, Vampirism as an STD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 15:30:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12535024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: ‘What’s it like?’‘Same as everything, Rhysand,’ Lucien answers, using his name maybe to piss him off, maybe because it’s too warm in his arms and it’s making what’s coming hurt even more than usual. ‘Not as great as it looks on tv.’____________________________Renfield's Verifie Disorder (or, Vampirism):A sexually transmitted blood-born disease, causing physical morphisms, heightened senses, photosensitivity, and in later stages, psychosis, paranoia, and mood disturbance.





	It's Okay, I Wouldn't Remember Me Either

Being a sex-worker during an epidemic of a sexually-transmitted disease ought to be more difficult, but Lucien’s nights are loud and busy. Then again, with his job description, he shouldn’t go in for that kind of stuff. None of the others do, heading back to their televisions and their kids when the night is through and they’ve been paid their dues. Cerridwen tells him he’s an idiot.

She isn’t wrong.

Each night he waits out the back of the club, numb fingers fumbling cigarettes. He curses over dying lighters. Dawn is just about to creep in when they come find him, come over and offer him a light. Watch him as he takes a drag and mutters about the weather. He could write a book just bitching about the cold.

‘Got a place for the night?’ They’ll ask, good samaritan types. The club’s owner locked up and went back to her two kids half an hour ago.

‘You offering?’ He always replies, squinting, sceptical. Some get bored of the pretence then and there, or worry he’s not getting it, and ask him outright. Others smile charming like and guide him to a car, to heated leather seats and a radio he’s free to fiddle with. It doesn’t matter shit to him which one they chose.

Not much matters to anyone anymore.

 

*

 

The first time he meets Rhysand, it’s not at the club, but with mates. They loitering outside a fancy restaurant for dandy types, a bunch of up to no good nobodies, and amongst the new arrivals, there he is: Three-piece suit, slicked back hair, smiles for days. Wearing a watch with diamonds so real you could cut your teeth on them. He’s a masterpiece, only he’s not at beautiful as any of them, and it is that which truly sets him apart.

He’s clean.

‘This guy’s getting us in,’ Giant says with a jab of the thumb and his usual transatlantic smoothness. Everyone else is quick to stop staring and start gunning for it. They’d never all gotten in before, but this guy, this guy looks like he’s worth a shot.

‘What’s your name?’ The Suit asks Lucien when a short while later, they’re locked inside a cubicle together in the restaurant bathrooms. Beyond the restroom walls, the staff are threatening to call the police if they don’t get out of there, say they’ll call the Hunters, have them all shot as Rabbids. The infected only shriek with laughter, gaggled together against the door, some howling, some throwing obscenities back like it’s tennis.

Normally, Lucien would tell him to fuck off, but the guy did give him his coke so maybe he can throw him a bone. ‘Fox,’ he says. It’s not with malice he hands out his stripper name; it’s what they all call him, just as he calls them Giant or The Girl or Gum or Crow. Even those he’s known his whole life, he wouldn’t dare call them by their christian names, not once they’re dirty. It doesn’t seem fair, to remind them they too were once human.

‘Guess that makes me Rabbit,’ The Suit replies with a smile that follows him throughout the night.

 

*

 

‘Why you with us?’ Lucien asks when they’ve all collapsed upon the peer, save Crow, still chasing seagulls. The Suit looks at him.

‘Why not?’

 

*

 

One minute Giant’s laughing, the next he’s foaming at the mouth. ‘Get the gun!’ Someone shouts as they watch him thrashing about on the ground, tearing clumps of mud and grass out with his big club hands.

‘I don’t have it.’ The Girl is kneeling down beside him. She’s not crying, not yet, still trying to reason him out of it like they all do when they see their first turning. It’s harder to watch her than him, but Lucien looks at neither, staring at The Suit.

‘What do you mean, you don’t have it? How can you not have it?’

‘I forgot it.’

‘How the fuck do you-’

Before they finish Gum is there. Gum, who doesn’t talk much and could never drive past roadkill without stopping to see if he could save it, appears with a rock in his hand. It’s about as big as his head, not quite as big as Giant’s. It does the job though. He has to use both hands.

Giant twitches on. It takes a couple of minutes of hacking and pummelling and grinding for the animation to truly fade from his body. He always was a fidgeter, back in high school when his ADHD was undiagnosed and he was everywhere all over the place, back when he answered to Cassian and wanted to marry a girl with lightning for eyes. He didn’t get to marry her, but now she’s clinging onto his body and sobbing so maybe she would have said yes.

 

*

 

‘You gonna stay?’ Lucien asks The Suit when they’re burying their dead. He doesn’t belong here, and everyone wants him to go. There’s something perverse about the way he can’t stop watching.

‘I don’t know.’

 

*

Two of the other strippers are infected now. That makes five of seven. Clients outside say they got what’s coming for them but Nuala got it from her husband and Cerridwen won’t stop sobbing because she doesn’t know. They told her it couldn’t spread if you used protection. The news keeps saying it’s not that bad. No one really has it.

 

*

 

‘How far along are you?’ The Suit asks him when they’re making out in his bedroom. He got dirty about a week ago, they all could smell it on him. So now they don’t laugh at him quite the way they used to, and he doesn’t seem quite so above it all. Lucien never thought he was in the first place. He’s always known he’s the worst of all.

‘Three months, give or take. Still in the good bit.’

The good bit is supposed to be a joke but now there’s forums and groups and teenage cults surrounding it. The part of the disease where you get hot, no longer marred by the imperfection that accompanies humanity, and your senses go fucking nuts so it seems like you’re superhuman. Apparently one chick even started being able to tell the future. There’s people all the time in the club now looking for more than naked flesh, they want a taste, a touch, to witness what’s happening to them. Some even want to get it too.

Maybe it’s not their fault they don’t really understand what comes after.  Or maybe it’s everyone’s fault.

‘What’s it like?’

‘Same as everything, Rhysand,’ Lucien answers, using his name maybe to piss him off, maybe because it’s too warm in his arms and it’s making what’s coming hurt even more than usual. ‘Not as great as it looks on tv.’

 

*

 

Rhys is at the club one night and he grabs him by the wrist on his break and pulls him out the back. Out here, their breath maps out before them in plumes of white, imitating life more artfully than they have ever managed.

Rhysand curls his lips back to bare his teeth. He presses the tip of Lucien’s forefinger against his incisor, which is now noticeably pronounced, elongating. He looks so thrilled that Lucien nearly slaps him.

‘It’s beginning.’

**Author's Note:**

> likely to update very sporadically if I decide to continue with it


End file.
